Reversing Diabetes

It was a cold morning in Toronto, the holidays were in the rearview mirror, 2015 was just a puppy. I waved the blood test requisition my doctor had given me last year and told my wife I was going for my blood test.

She admonished me. “You’ve just partied with your friends over the holidays, we’ve been out every day and you’ve been binging on all the wrong stuff…why don’t you wait a few days before going in for that test?”

Saner advice had never been given and saner advice had never been ignored. I skipped to the corner lab and presented my arm to be drained.

7.3mmol

That was what my BG reading came back as! According to my doctor, I was now diabetic. He needed to do further tests to confirm however…but he thought I was firmly type 2 diabetic.

I could have cried a river, but I was strangely calm, calm in the face of the ‘I told you’s’ which I got from you know who.

I waited a few weeks before I took my new blood work requisitions to get drained again. The number of tubes they needed to fill made my head spin. And then there was the glucose tolerance test.

I was hoping beyond hope that these test results came back benign. I was dreading seeing my physician again.

I am a little more educated on diabetes today then I was then, what the numbers mean and what the guidelines say, so these tests didn’t confirm a diabetic diagnosis, but they did confirm a diagnosis of pre-diabetes.

The enormity of it all hadn’t hit me yet. I chose to think it was an anomaly, that I had indulged a bit too much over the holidays and getting back to my routine would rid myself of this new tag.

Almost a year passed by. It was November and we had friends over one evening. After dinner that night, I went to sleep, not knowing that I was going to get a shock the following day.

My BG reading the next morning was a massive 8.5mmol! I was shocked. A reading of over 7 one time is enough for the medical establishment to declare you a diabetic, and here I had hit that number out of the ball park.

I was worried now. My dad has been diabetic for the last twenty five to thirty years and I was staring at the same life sentence. I was always concerned about this…in fact I had asked my family physician when I was a teen if I need to stop eating sugary treats…the advice I had gotten then was “once you are diabetic, you won’t be able to to, so go ahead and enjoy.” And I did…I was a sugar addict. I could wolf down entire chocolate bars, so much so that my mom and brother used to hide the choicest of chocolates away so that I wouldn’t eat them all at one go and they had some for themselves.

In hindsight, that advice from my doctor in the late eighties was entirely misplaced.

I knew I had to take this seriously. I had only two choices in front of me…the first was to get a handle by way of diet and exercise the other, to do what my family physician wanted, start considering medication.

I decided to do some research. Everyone who knows me closely knows that I am a compulsive researcher. Give me a subject and I will research the crap out of it. I decided to learn about diabetes and turned to Amazon. I found a book that was an introduction to the type 2 diabetic life. And starting reading.

The author explained why taking insulin at a certain stage was necessary for diabetics. Type 2 diabetes was brought on by insulin resistance. As blood sugars went higher, more insulin was needed to bring sugars down, hence exogenous insulin was administered.

Running this through my mind a couple of times I had a question. If I was insulin resistant, then I had all this extra insulin coursing through my body, and then I was going to have more insulin pumped in. Was it ok to have all this extra insulin circulating through my body?

I then let that thought Pass. Diabetes has been around for decades I thought, if too much insulin was bad for you, why would they treat you with it? So I moved on.

A couple of weeks later, as I was on facebook, an advert caught my eye. Toronto Star was advertising a write up by a Dr. Jason Fung who was saying he could reverse diabetes naturally!

I have been using the internet since the early early days…1990’s. I have grown up with the internet…actually, given my age, I feel it is my younger sibling. I know intimately that information on the net needs to be vetted and verified before it can be believed.

As we have seen, the power of the internet can be corrupted and misused by anyone. Always be suspicious of anything you read on the World Wide Web of deceit! So I delved into the article. To my surprise this Doctor was saying that insulin itself was a cause for insulin resistance! My mind snapped back to my earlier thought…aha!

Fortunately Dr. Fung was prolific on the internet. He had a blog which contained all of his thoughts on type 2 diabetes. He had YouTube videos, and I watched each one of them. What he said made sense.

I have followed his advice. I changed my diet and my relationship with food and I have been rewarded with normal blood sugars! My physician has had to conclude that I am not diabetic.

My last ninety day BG average is 5.2mmol. Back in the last quarter of 2015 it was 6.4mmol. I do not take any medication except a multivitamin. Am I cured? No. If I go back to my old ways, my insulin resistance will slowly but surely come back. But the alternative is worse. With conventional treatment for diabetes, I will progress from one pill, to two pills, to three pills…till such time as they will want to pump insulin into me.

My blood sugars will stay low with this treatment, but my disease, which is actually insulin resistance will never improve. It will only get worse. And it is important to realize that most people on conventional treatment for diabetes, because of all of this insulin being pumped in, despite the blood sugars being low will go on to develop serious diabetes complications including permanent organ damage to limbs, eyes, kidneys.

By simply changing your relationship with food, you can maintain normal blood sugars, you can reverse or prevent metabolic syndrome, which includes high blood pressure, heart disease, inflammation, artherosclerosis. I am dedicating this blog to Dr. Jason Fung.

If you have questions, feel free to reach out to me through comments on this blog. I am happy to share what I have learned and help you in your journey to reverse diabetes naturally.